The Man Behind the Scars

“Yes, a marriage,” he threw at her, his eyes so cold—the coldest she’d ever seen. She repressed a shiver. “And what a marriage it is. I am such a terrible creature that I was forced to buy myself a wife whose financial irresponsibility is what led her straight into my arms. What a joyous union           indeed. How lucky we are.”

“All this because I said I loved you,” Angel said quietly. “It seems a little extreme, don’t you think?”

“I don’t want your love.” His voice was like a lash. Angel had to fight to keep from flinching away from it.

He moved closer, so dark and big, looming there, and it crossed her mind that she should have been afraid of him—but she wasn’t. It was almost sad, how much she wanted that to mean things it couldn’t. It was even sadder how very much she wanted to simply reach over and wrap her arms around him. Even now.

“I want your compliance,” he said, his voice a harsh whisper that might as well have been a shout. “I want your body. I want heirs. You can keep what you call love to yourself.”

He turned then, and started across the sweep of Persian rug beneath their feet, as if for the door. As if, she realized in some mix of dawning horror and something else, something that rolled through her and made her stomach twist, he had said all he needed to say. And something in Angel snapped. She felt it break, hard, and then crumble into pieces.

She thought of his autocratic behavior the day of the wedding, and how hard she’d had to fight to keep from reacting as she’d wanted to react. She tried to imagine a lifetime of that—years upon years spent smiling when she wanted to scream. She wondered what it would be like when she was older, when she didn’t have this body any longer, when she’d lost it to babies and gravity—when she was rendered wholly worthless to him. She thought about what it would mean to love this man like this, desperately and foolishly, and know that he would never, ever return it. Not if he could help it.

And she couldn’t do it. Not now that she knew him so much better, so much more intimately. Not now that she’d seen him smile, heard him laugh, seen that there was more to him than all his grim seriousness, all his cold menace. She knew too much now. She knew him.

“No,” she said. Her voice rang across the room, and she imagined she could feel it echo inside of her, like a church bell.

“This is not a debate,” Rafe snapped in his arrogant way, turning back to fix her with that intimidating scowl. “It is not even a discussion.”

“You can make all the pronouncements you want,” she retorted. “It’s not going to work.”

“Our agreement—”

“I don’t care.” She shrugged when he stopped talking and stared at her as if she’d startled him. She felt a new kind of heat move through her then. It warmed her cheeks and was like electricity in her veins, crackling and snapping. Temper. Finally. “I know you feel things for me too. You can’t just pretend it isn’t happening because it doesn’t fit into your narrow definition of what this is supposed to look like between us.”

“What I feel for you is no more and no less than the basest form of lust,” he threw at her with deadly accuracy. “And a great sense of relief that I was not required to waste my time pursuing you in the usual way, as I would have had to do if you were not so desperate nor so shameless. You are a convenience, Angel. Nothing more.”

She told herself it didn’t matter what he said now, that he was striking out deliberately. That it didn’t have to hurt unless she let it. But she felt dizzy and a little bit sick, and she knew that was cold comfort, at best.

“I know that’s not true.” She hoped it wasn’t true. She hoped. But she stood straight, though her hands were balled into fists at her sides, and looked him in the eye anyway. He stared back at her, so very grim, with that visible current of banked fury pulsing just beneath his cold surface. This, then, was that part of him he’d hinted at, that he’d indicated lived below his surface. But she didn’t think he was quite as contained as he wanted to be. As he usually was.

There was a part of her that took that as a triumph.

“What is it you love then, Angel?” he asked, and she couldn’t help but flinch slightly at the sound of his voice. It was like a blade. Whisper-soft and deadly, and it cut into her, deeper with every word. “Is it this face? I know exactly how beautiful it is—how entrancing. Or is it the monster beneath it, do you think? The one so terrible his own family loathed him since he was a child. Who somehow lived when all of his friends were blown to pieces all around him. Is it that you love? Or is it, instead, my endlessly attractive bank account?”